


between the shadow and the soul

by ourseparatedcities



Category: Football RPF
Genre: Angst, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-18
Updated: 2014-09-18
Packaged: 2018-02-17 21:32:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2323859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ourseparatedcities/pseuds/ourseparatedcities
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From multiple missed opportunities to transfer window shockers, the summer of 2014 has not been kind to Steven Gerrard and Xabi Alonso.</p>
            </blockquote>





	between the shadow and the soul

Your hands are clutching at the balcony and you don’t realize how desperately until you feel a brilliant sharpness, a sudden trickle of warmth dripping down the center of your palm to your wrist. You flip your hand over, blink at the intrusive reminder that you are currently here, in Rio with the city before you refusing to sleep and the darkness of the hour transforming the blood on your skin from red to inky black. It’s quieter than last night, when the sounds of firecrackers exploding in the night haunted you until you finally took a sleeping pill and buried your head underneath a pillow. 

You are here, and even after you’ve managed to swallow down the disappointment of your own embarrassing defeat at the World Cup, managed to make something akin to peace with the narrative of the victorious kings being ousted by old rivals, this is something you didn’t account for. That you would be here, wiping the stain away with a soft cloth and curiously tonguing the thin break in skin, feeling another’s anguish weighted down in the pit of your own stomach. You think that the nearly 300 miles separating you would have tempered this, that the passing months without a single syllable exchanged would have given the pain a lovely blunted edge that you’ve discovered a certain fondness for. But no. 

He is your phantom limb and you ache from the absence of him every day.

 Some more than others, like tonight, when you left dinner with the rest of your team ( _La Tristeza Roja_ , someone had cracked at dinner, and you had laughed so mechanically that it came out more like a cough) to mourn for him. You wonder, at moments like this, if Stevie feels your grief as intimately, as acutely, as you do his. It’s inevitable, really. It’s impossible to know someone as well as you know him, to grasp the ways in which his unquestioning, selfless devotion to club and country is both his fatal flaw and the very best of him, to take on the wholeness of him without acquiring the sorrow as well. You know that right now, he is tearing himself apart in measures trying to bear the entirety of his country’s disappointment on his own two shoulders. You begin to think, _If only I_ … and stop yourself immediately because nothing good ever came after.

 (You think it anyway, later, when you’re drifting off into sleep. _If only I were there to rest my head on that shoulder and coax him into bed and kiss that mouth until the frown slipped away._ Your mother always saw that bit of conceit in you, underneath the charm and class she’d instilled.)

 Your treacherous fingers reach for him on the touchscreen on your phone, hovering millimeters from the picture of Stevie you’d managed to sneak at ITV studios, his face broken by his bashful, lopsided grin. There’s hunger there too, coiled around the base of your despair, to taste his joys again with your tongue.

You do not call him.

You fall asleep to the stinging of the cut on your palm.

That night, your dreams are of the sweltering heat in Miami melting your bones.

 

~

 

The temperature is kinder in Portofino, the sunlight a balmy caress along your cheekbones and the line of your arms as they glide along the surface of the pool. You tip your head back and you can feel the rays dragging along the deepening hollows underneath your eyes. These days, you feel the weight of your bones more acutely, even now as you float in the sun-dappled water of the pool and feel it bearing the burden for you. You collect your outstretched limbs until your body curls naturally into a tight ball and sink into the stillness, the unbroken silence, underneath the water. 

You linger past the point of comfort, of wisdom. 

You stay until your lungs are screaming in helpless need, until your throat feels scraped raw from trying to hold back a wail, until you finally succumb to the pressure building in your skull and kick your legs to lift you to the top again. The pulse in your neck is erratic and your mouth is opened wide as you gulp down air, swallow the whole of the sky as you intimately understand a different sort of starvation. Your shoulderblades draw together like furled wings preparing for flight as you hoist yourself up onto the edge of the pool.

Nagore’s immersed in the novel you’re sharing, you can tell from the way the tiny little furrow has appeared between her brows. You lean in to press a kiss against those lines, grateful that you have had the experience of watching them wink out from beneath her skin over the years. Her smile is brighter than the midsummer day as she looks up at you, turning her grinning lips up for a kiss that you gladly oblige. Her mouth has become so familiar to you that it tastes like nothing, like water or air. Something so constant and necessary that it’s fades into normalcy.

The knowledge bursts inside of you, that your life is irrevocably intertwined with hers, that after all these years, you are no longer you without her. You were reminded of it once again recently as you sat on the worn-in couch, thumbing through instagram and landing on a picture of little Lou in a Real Madrid kit. What hurts the most is not the sharp reminder that you have missed out on so many of her, _of his_ , best and worst days. It is the critical awareness that the years have not stopped their passing for you. Somehow, it is the mundane nature of daily occurrences that feels like a betrayal to both of you.

You’re inundated by the desire to apologize to him. _I’m sorry. I’m sorry for not being the one to send Lou the Real kit. I’m sorry for leaving our Anfield, the secret places where I fell in love with your city, with you. I’m sorry for not breaking the hands off all the clocks, so that time would freeze in that moment right before destruction and we could safely return to it one day. I’m sorry that we have built homes without rooms to house one another. I am sorry for everything but loving you._ It seems somehow silly to apologize for something you had little choice in doing. 

Nagore had passed by the couch on the way to check on the kids, brushing a careless hand gently over the top of your barely tamed hair, a throwaway gesture. The single touch had been enough to hold you together, to still the relentless roiling of regret inside of you. You were not sorry for her, for building something solid and enduring between the two of you. When the immensity of what existed between you and Stevie made you feel as though you were coming unmoored, afloat with no horizon, Nagore was your center of gravity. One touch and you could be pulled back into this life, with the sound of your children’s laughter floating in the dining room and their artistic scribbles proudly adorning the front of your fridge, their joyful framed faces leading down the hallway to your bedroom. She had grounded you then.

Now, she drops the book onto your lap as you’re wiping away the last few droplets of water shimmering in the sunlight on your chest, her strides long and graceful before she dives into the water. You watch until you see her resurface, her thick dark hair glistening as it swirls around her slender shoulders.

You imagine this is why you’ve never been particularly religious. It feels supremely unfair that you should contain such overwhelming, boundless love for both of them and still be afforded only one lifetime. Maybe the heaviness is not from the years, but the straining of your body to bear the weight of both of these lives.  

You touch the pair of matching bookmarks peeking out from the top of the novel and count the days until Miami, the promise of it folded comfortably inside of you.

 

~

 

There’s a low rumble threatening like thunder at the edge of your scalp, a shiver skittering along the small of your back and the hands that look like yours have formed fists that you aren’t accustomed to making. It feels awkward, like going through the steps of a dance you only half remember but the tune is as seductive as ever. You wonder if this is madness or protection, seeing yourself from this safe distance outside of your skin. You might be a blade of grass on this field in Dallas, coated with the sweat of those still on the field, you could be the sliver of moon intruding upon the silky fabric of the night sky, you might be the juncture where the net enfolds the goal post in its embrace. You could be all the stillness in the world for all the impotence you feel in this moment.

The connection between the body sitting on the sidelines, silently swallowing down an endless sea of sadness, and the whirling, howling fury inside of your mind stretches towards breaking. Desperation keeps you focused on the facts, which are: you are in Dallas; in four days, you will be in Michigan; in six days, you would have been in Miami. But you are in Dallas now and the scoreboard reads 0 to 1 in favor of AS Roma and your fists unclench themselves long enough to focus on the puckered flesh of a tiny scar. There’s a darkly cynical laugh curled underneath your tongue and you tamp down on it, because it says that you should have known, that this is the price you pay for being a coward.

At some point, you don’t really remember it, you slide down from the seat until you’re huddled on the ground, your legs sprawling out over the turf carelessly. The general buzz of surprised and amused chatter about the pitch invaders should be a comfort, but it grates against you like nails leaving broken trails on delicate skin. You hear Sergio shouting in annoyance at the field and you envy him, for being able to excise himself with such vehemence, to indulge himself in the honesty of his emotions.

You set yourself to automatic after that, coasting smoothly until somehow you end up back in your hotel room. The skin on your back is sensitive to the touch because you left the shower on hot for too long but feeling the stunning pain of the water searing flesh had been intensely gratifying. There were things in the world that could still reach you. Carefully, you set yourself on the edge of the bed, the balls of your feet resting on the floor in front of you and your elbows pushing into the give of your thighs. Your head falls so easily into your awaiting palms that you think they were made just for mourning.

The thing is, this is not fate. If you were a lesser man, you might believe that today’s defeat was the sonorous voice of stardust and past lives and worlds balanced atop turtles reminding you that you are not meant for him. But you would gladly break the world apart and rebuild it anew if that is what it took for the roads and rivers to lead you back to one another eventually. You are the waves pulled endlessly toward the shore, though there is no moon in sight, crashing headlong into the surf until you’re both softened in the process. Or maybe this time, you break.

You wonder if he knows yet, if he’s scowling at the tv screen with arms crossed over his chest, the wrinkles darting out on his forehead. Your phone remains dishearteningly silent, but you can’t bring yourself to condemn him. ( _Mostly because it would make you a hypocrite as well as a coward. It doesn’t stop you for choking on the need to hear his voice, though._ ) Maybe five minutes pass, maybe an hour and a day, but eventually you scrape your palms roughly over your scruffy face and discard the remains of the day, sliding underneath the covers to impatiently summon sleep.  

You do not break.  

You do not call him.

 

~

  


Your eyes follow Iker as his ever-steady hands wrap around the base of the Super Cup and he throws his head back to roar in celebration. The confetti cannons release and there’s a sparkling, shimmering shower raining over your teammates as their voices find the right pitch to match your captain’s. It should be easy to join in, to crack your jaw open until your voice blend seamlessly with theirs, but you can’t. The tie around your throat ventures towards suffocation, the fabric of your classically-cut suit stiflingly hot and everything feels subtly wrong. Like the slightly coppery, electric taste of the violence of a far-off storm beginning to brew. The sky is perfectly pristine but the hair on the back of your arms lifts from your skin and quivers in the air and you _know_. 

It’s time. 

You’re familiar with the slow start of it, just an insistent ticking that sets off somewhere below your ear when your hand is encased in Platini’s. It recedes into the background after, like a leaky faucet that you have no understanding of how to fix. The ringing carries you through the evening, as you rip off your suit and tug on a pair of jeans hastily, the light flush warming Alvaro’s cheeks telling you that he’s already making headway on the night’s plan to get appropriately smashed. He walks too close on the way to the bar, his sleeve brushing against yours and you remember that there are times when you resent the camaraderie, the expectations of solidarity when you would rather wallow in an empty room as it throws itself into night. The stars blink out above you, strewn haphazardly across the sky and the miles between your city and his is too short for your thoughts to resist the tug of him.

You’re grateful for the pulsating beat of the music when you make it there, for Cristiano leading the shout for _HALA MADRID_ ( _y nada más_! the rest of the bar cheers in reply, and their jubilance drowns out the music) so you can edge Alvaro in their direction. You consign yourself to a bar stool hidden away in a smoky corner, dark enough that the restlessness in your eyes can go unseen, order a Stella even when you want the fiery tongues of whiskey licking down your insides. It’s your third one of the night and you’re well on your way to brooding when Cris’ voice breaks through the fog of cigarette fumes, making you turn in curiosity as he throws his arms around Beto, his fellow national. It should be more startling, you think, to watch as a few more members of the Sevillan team stream into the bar behind their goalkeeper, but there’s something about being in a land that is not your own and wanting to hear a language you understand that smudges away the boundaries. You order another, drink it faster than the rest.

You wander outside, because the ticking’s discovered the beat of your heart and harmonized with it, making you feel suddenly edgy, suddenly caged in by months left in contract agreements and obligations and feet without wings. Midnight in Cardiff is refreshing, a cool towel on a feverish forehead, and you dimly consider taking up smoking when you bump right into Alberto Moreno. He is so shiny and brightly new, crisp as an apple with tear-reddened eyes and still-stained cheeks, that he interrupts the comforting lull of darkness. You have never been as coltish as him, moved with the same self-conscious hesitation, as though you’re waiting for permission to exist. It makes you feel every single one of the years you’ve accumulated, ancient and weary.

“ _Pardon_ ,” he says, eyes lowering as he moves back and the gesture draws out a pang of sympathy in you.

“It’s nothing, Alberto.” You reach out and touch his arm, a gentling brush of fingers on the skin of a skittish creature. “Everything okay?” 

You’re expecting distant politeness, for a nod of the head and a quick rearranging of his spine to make him appear more sturdy. Instead, he nervously drags his bottom lip between his teeth to worry at it and it reminds you so vividly of Jon that it elicits an instant rush of fatherly affection. You settle for patting his shoulder gingerly with your other hand.

“It’s alright. There will be other trophies.”

His frown is as forlorn as it is petulant, his head shaking in refusal.

“Not with Sevilla.” His voice is still coated with the remnants of his earlier sorrow and it makes the corner of your mouth swing upward in crooked amusement.

“No, you’ll win with Liverpool.”

“It won’t be the same. I don’t know anything about living in England. I don’t even speak English!” You have to purse your lips to keep a chuckle from sounding out at his earnestness.  

“No, it won’t. But that won’t make it any less great. The gameplay is different, the club is new to you, but it…” You trail off, because it feels like such an impossible task to tell him what your time there meant to you. How do you describe the necessity of your kidneys to someone who isn’t currently residing inside of your own skin? You wade through the whorl of emotion to the eye.   

“It’s not England, it’s Liverpool. And Anfield is not a place. It’s a people, the most extraordinary people you’ll ever meet. You’ll go out onto that pitch where they will already know your name, the Kop will already be bleeding Liverpool red and you’ll want to belong to them. They’ll love you, they’ll bring you into their lives, they’ll cheer for you even when you don’t deserve it. Especially when you don’t deserve it.”

You clear your throat because it’s as if you’ve consumed the sun, making everything inside of you molten, burnished with gold.

“It will drive you onward, make you push yourself harder than you ever have before, to be worthy of it all. You’ll spend the rest of your life, even after you leave them, trying to become the sort of player who deserves their adoration. They’ll love you, and you...you’ll fall in love with the club.” You make yourself stop there, because his eyes have gone wide enough for you to  notice the tawny spots inside of them, even in the dusk.  

“You won’t regret it, Alberto. You’ll never regret Liverpool.” He nods emphatically at you, all agreement and instant belief in the absolute truth of your words. It’s unnerving, the way he looks at you, too close and too invested. Like you’re his captain fantastic. You much prefer the distance _Señor Alonso_ allows you. Another kindly pat and you step away, in full retreat.

“Thank you, sincerely,” he starts and you wave it away with a flick of your hand.

“Take care.” _Of yourself. Of them. Of him_.

You’ve paid your dues enough for one evening when you slink back off towards the hotel. On the way there, all the signs are all in English, the names of the streets unfamiliar. You’re transported back to your first few months in Liverpool all over again, all disdainful irritation over the lack of fine dining options and getting randomly lost in the city. Maybe if you turn down this alleyway, he’ll be there, in that ratty green sweater he wore for months at a time and a pair of scuffed up jeans. His hair will be unkempt, his smirk will be as taunting as it is tempting, and his arms will be lanky and inelegant as they find their way around you. The wind will bear the whisper of the Mersey as it ruffles your hair and you will be incandescent with the glow of the whole of the city inside of you.

The ticking slows, but it remains.

 

~

 

You’re back home for two days before it picks up in volume, when Pep calls you mid-afternoon. The phone rings and when he speaks on the other end of the line, you hear a muffled clicking as all the broken bits of yourself shift back towards one another. You scramble for excuses, haggle with him over the most miniscule of details because you are a Spaniard who planted roots in an English city and left before you got to see them bloom. It’s a solid attempt, you think, when the faint flicker of doubt inside of you brightens and you consider the possibility of other options. It’s not until he finds the perfect bruise to press forcefully down on,

“ _Por La Undécima does have not the same ring, Xabier_ ,” before you’re asking yourself what comes next.

Which is this: you prepare to dig up the roots and cover the gaping cavern with dirt. You’ll pat the soil until it lays flat again, until the only proof that anything ever existed there will be your muddy hands.

Which is that you don’t mention it to the team. It’s not that you actively choose to keep it from them. It’s just that you’ve already built these walls to retreat behind and you might as well use them. Besides, the truth is bald and ugly. ( _I want more. I have it in me to be selfish. If it has to end, I want it to end on my terms._ ) You tell Nagore while you’re sitting at the table, half-empty glasses of wine before you. She meets your eyes and rests her palm on the back of your knuckles, lets her thumb brush against the side of your hand as she asks if she should work on finding a German tutor here or wait until you’re settled in Munich. There are words you know to express how grateful, how blessed, you are but you fumble in finding them and rest your forehead instead on where you are connected. You tell Alvaro too, because you don’t make friends easily and because he’s entangled in your memories of Liverpool, which means you’ll always love him just a bit more than you would’ve otherwise. He throws his arm around you and makes the requisite joke about lederhosen that coaxes a genuine chuckle out of you.  

Which is that you throw yourself headlong into your training again, push your muscles until they are past the point of soreness each night as you ease them into an ice bath. When Real Madrid loses the Copa Del Rey ( _you think of it that way already,_ Real Madrid loses, _not_ you lose), you savor the slight sting of it, feel it stoking the leftover embers from an extinguished inferno. When Pep sends you the videotapes of recent Bayern games, you feel the faint buzz of excitement growing, not even the thin layer of guilt managing to stifle it. You want this.

You almost call him at every turn of the day. In the mornings, you imagine playing it off with a joke about how you’re just going to keep Pepe Reina out of trouble. In the afternoons, you consider trying make him understand why you couldn’t come back ( _you can’t go back home, Stevie, you no longer fit._ You know that home is not a place, but you don’t tell him that). In the evenings, when you’re hovering at the brink at absolute exhaustion, mentally and physically pushed past limits you’d set for yourself, all you can give him is the reminder that Munich is almost exactly a hundred miles closer to him than Madrid, as though it makes the other nine hundred somehow more bearable. You’re a fool, buying stamps for letters you will never send.

In the end, Nagore saves you from it. You’re chopping tomatoes in the kitchen when she wanders in and hovers beside you, her eyes cast toward the chopping board. She touches your arm when she tells you that she spoke to Alex earlier, had mentioned the move to her. Your fingers freeze immediately, because you know that if you keep cutting, your unsteady hands will give you away. There isn’t enough air in your lungs or your mouth or the room, there isn’t enough air in the whole of Madrid as you feel the bones of your ribcage clenching in a vice grip. You swallow thickly, your tongue dragging through sand to reply, “Oh?”

She nods, nudges you aside to take the knife from your chilled hand and resumes slicing as though she had expected you to react like this. It takes you by surprise though, because you thought you’d braced yourself for this devastation, that ten days would be enough to come to terms with the loss of something that been blossoming inside of you for nearly ten years. ( _Somewhere in the distance, your mother scoffs at your arrogance._ ) You gather your scattered emotions and bend yourself to fit inside the outlines of this life.

You linger that night when you’re tucking Jon and Ane into their beds, continue humming her favorite lullaby long after Emma grows slumber-heavy in your arms. By the time you make it through your nighttime ritual, Nagore has already flipped off the lamps on the bedside tables and fallen asleep. You’re engulfed by the impulse to hear his voice then, even if it’s colored by fury or sorrow or disappointment. Even if it is cold and carries every single one of the miles that keeps him from you in its tone. Perhaps that’s the worst part of this, that you don’t feel his heart beating inside of yours anymore, can’t anticipate the exact pattern of his pulse. Your tendons are on the verge of snapping, stretched too thin, too far. You waver at the edge on the side opposite to where Nagore is and touch a flimsy shadow on the floor with the tip of your toe.

You force yourself to lie in the bed that you have made.

 

~

 

You hunch your shoulders forward and barrel through the next couple of days. Whenever that anxious, nauseous gnawing feeling arises, you cage it in behind the bars of your teeth. _You’re okay you’re okay you’re okay,_ you chant in your head. A prayer from a nonbeliever. The farce becomes easier to inhabit as others buy into it, as you spend your evenings becoming acquainted with the subtle nuances of whiskey. Not that it matters to you, because you’re drinking to forget, to murder the hopeless hours in between awakening and sleeping again. Besides, they all taste like betrayal. Or maybe that’s just you.

Two days later, you’re wincing as you watch Javi Martinez wind his leg back and crack his knee squarely into Schmelzer’s back when Nagore strides into the room and places her iPad on your lap. You pause the game and look up at her quizzically, but she’s too focused on her phone call with your real estate agent to acknowledge it. Her hand is just slightly warm when she rests it against your back before leaving.

You glance down at the screen and every emotion you nearly managed to trap sets itself loose, implodes inside of you with such breathtaking violence that your sharp inhale of surprise gets trampled by it.

His face rests on the edge of the frame and you think there is no line of poetry more beautiful than the ones crinkling at the corner of his eyes. In the center lays little Lou, proudly waving the flag of Bayern Munich with her garishly colored kit.

You bite down on the inside of your mouth and when the metallic flavor of blood coats your tongue, it tastes like infinite kindness, like unexpected absolution. You’re painfully aware of how wrong you were, because you are a lesser man, but he is not. You’re shaking as you reach for him, touching the reflection of what isn’t there as in a mirror box.

The phone’s against your ear before you’ve recovered enough to keep your voice even, but the poignant longing clenches inside of you and makes you reckless.

You do not call him.

You book a flight instead, your hands finding the crack in the world and splitting it open.

 

~

 

You step onto English soil and the painted gray of the gloomy sky, the last remaining wisps of fog in the air seems lovely to you, transformed in that way that distance has a knack for. The brake on the rental car sticks slightly, but you’ve made this trek before, you know where all the bumps in the road lie in wait. You’re on your way to the hotel when the church bells chime melodiously further off and you realize that you know exactly where Stevie will be on a day reserved for worship. There are three cars in the lot, his parked toward the end with a single space to the right of it, as though he’s been saving it for you. You slide off your jacket and leave it in the car, despite the touch of chill the wind brings with it.  

It’s easy to slip through a side door and the click of it behind you followed by the untainted hush of the empty hallways surround you. Your feet are guiding you forward before your mind fully catches on and then you’re standing in the center of it, but with all the distance of a spectator. The paint splashed on the walls is new and even, the gaping cubbies shinier than you remember them being, but nothing is worse than the bracing, anesthetized smell in the locker room. As though the memories you’d made in this room were some hideous, filthy thing, bleached out of the foundation.

You call him.

He answers on the third ring and you hear his inhale as he means to speak, but you interrupt.

“I think your Shakespeare would have enjoyed the UCL draw,” you say in way of greeting. “There’s some comedy, some tragedy to it.”

He snorts on the other end of the line and your tongue finds the carving of waning moons on the inside of your mouth.

“He’s a sick lad, that William.” He’s quiet again and you know he’s searching for the words, wading through the myriad of possibilities to select the most demanding of his emotions.

“I transferred to Bayern.”

“I know. Alex told me.” The slight wistfulness of his tone blunts the reprimand in it, but it still says, _it should’ve been you_. You wish it might’ve been.

“Do you think it means something, that we missed Group B? That we missed Miami and Brazil? That these chances keep getting taken away from us?”

You suppose it’s unkind to rip off the covering of banter and expose the naked, hideous trauma underneath without warning, but you’ve borne the burden of this beast of a thought for too long. You hear his breathing stutter on the other end, but he steadies himself with an inhale.

“I don’t know. Maybe.” You know all the angles of his voice, the hidden places where he hides away his weaknesses, and you’re expecting the refusal to oblige the vagaries of fate that you find there. But the resentment is unexpected, though not surprising.

“Maybe?”

“Maybe it means that we should stop.” The sarcasm is clear and exaggerated, but even the possibility of the words being true wraps around your throat and squeezes hard enough to nearly draw out a gasp. “Maybe we stop this thing now. Or maybe we start being brave.”

_Maybe we stop pretending that this is just some reaction to proximity, an accident of skin brushing skin causing enough friction for a dazzling explosion. Maybe we stop waiting for the world to force us together like reluctant relatives, like we’re only fulfilling our duty to nostalgia. Maybe we unmask ourselves and touch in a room with the lights glaring down on us without shame. Maybe we come together because we choose one another over everything else._

“I retired from international football.” _I already chose you._

“Following in me footsteps?” Another sudden shift, but he recovers more easily this time, a distant grin in his retort. “Gonna come be a red again then?”

“No, but I’ll come to Anfield.”

“Yeah? When?”

“Now.”

“Bugger off,” he scoffs at you.

“Stevie,” you scold mildly.

“Xabi.” It’s a low tendril of smoke in the air, a needy whimper, and you have to dig your heels into the floor to keep yourself still. You wait for him to meet you halfway. “Where?” 

“Where it all started.” You hang up and close your eyes, count your exhales until you hear his hurried footfalls falter in pace, until you can’t tell if the pounding in your head is your blood or his heartbeat. Your eyelids flutter open and his face is resplendent in its agony, its rhapsody. His arms swing down by his sides, suddenly shy, suddenly unsure, and it punches into you that he might have fears of his own. Your trembling fingers betray you when your hands lift, one sliding around to cup the back of his head and fit your bodies together, tucking your face into the awaiting hinge of his shoulder and neck. 

“You could’ve called, you wanker,” he declares against your hair, his hand fisting at the back of your shirt as he presses into you. Even through the layers of your mutual fabric, the warmth of his solid body against yours turns you upside down, makes your throat feel as it’s trying to climb out of your ankles.

“I was trying to be brave.” You make yourself say it, because you’re safely ensconced in his embrace, enveloped by the purity of the immutable scent that clings to his skin.

You lean your head back until you blindly find his mouth, swoop down onto it with your own so that you can press all the words you cannot say to him along the seam of his lips. _You made me brave. You made me believe that something with no beginning might have no end. You made me want to linger even when my instinct is to leave._ It’s not enough and your tongue wedges his mouth apart until you feel the edge of teeth scraping in response. You gorge on the desperation of his groan as he licks into your mouth, as his faulty fingers nearly rip your shirt apart in their effort to rid you both of barriers. This furious fervor drives you until you’ve sloughed the clothes and distance off your bare bodies, inconsolably shuddering together, trying to fuse the planes and angles of yourselves together in defiance.

You push him gracelessly back against the surface of the wall, plant kisses like flags on his torso, stark and sanguine over the pale expanse. The tip of your teeth travel over the hill of his hipbones and you discover that they protrude more than they used to, that he is capable of inconstancy as well. You taste the forgotten places, the back of his knee, the inside of his elbow, the sloping path to his bellybutton, preserving them as a method of coping. His fingers grip at your shoulder, dragging you back up to your feet when you would kneel in supplication, imprint damning souvenirs on giving flesh that you will carry with you even when you leave. His kiss is feather light at the edge of your eyelashes, the corner of your mouth, nose nuzzling against yours and the tenderness of it nearly undoes you.

You scrabble for lust, fluid and simplistic, as you turn into the wall, flattening your damp  palms against the welcome coolness of it as you arch backwards: an invitation, a demand. You’re muffling moans against Liverpool red when he slides inside of you, his slippery flesh splendidly obscene as it glides along the small of your back, notches your hips together with a palm on your waist. He whimpers your name in reverence underneath the lobe of your ear and you cry out his, as solemn as an oath. Then, there are constellations dancing along the inside of your eyelids, there are sunbeams scorching all the places on your body where your skin meets his, the only places where you exist.

The last thing you remember is his hand clasping yours against the wall, linking you together as the dying stars inside of you explode into infinite new planets.  

 

~

 

You slip into your clothes again in silence, though your restless hands wander and touch bits of one another before they’re covered again. When you’re fully dressed again, you fall onto the bench and peer up at him, admiring the raised, reddened bump at the corner of his collarbone. He meets your eyes as he strokes his fingers through your hair, the tumult captured there in blue leaving you shaken enough to rest your forehead against his thigh. 

“How long?” He asks.

“Only tonight and the morning.”

His hand stills in its affections before his thumb follows the curl of your ear.

“Okay.”

You leave his car in the parking lot, because you’d rather say goodbye at Anfield ( _to Anfield)_ than in miscellaneous rooms, and his pinky discovers the notches between your knuckles on the drive there. You bully him into a repeat performance in the shower with the spray beating down against his chest as you devour him wholly, his hands endlessly gentle at the back of your head. You flip through the channels until you find a game that neither of you have serious stakes in (DC United vs. NY Red Bulls) and throws yourselves enthusiastically into it. Eventually, you yearn for something beyond one another and you order room service. You shut the door behind you with the back of your foot and turn back around, mouth poised open when you find the room empty. The balcony door is slid halfway open and you can see him from here, framed in the overture of the evening. You step out barefoot, your stance an echo of his, forearms resting on the metal.

You can sense it in the way he leans his weight forward, the heels of his feet lifted slightly from the ground, that he is already a day away, sorting through the mess to find the right words to say goodbye. Only, you know the truth. That there are no words in your shared language to dull the keen blade that will part you from him. It’s dangerously easy to slip back inside of this version of yourself, the specific set of circumstances where you might share a sink and his towel hangs beside yours on the holder. You watch the dying of the day with your elbows touching, your finger trailing over the miniscule bump that remains to herald past suffering.

“We’re both still retired,” you remind him, a vow taken just as the sun dips below the horizon and the sky is a frenzy of blush and bronze.

He doesn’t speak, but his pinky and ring finger entangle with yours. You stay that way until there is no light left in the sky.

You make your way inside with the dusk looming over you, settle into the bed and eat a late supper of lukewarm hamburgers and cold fries. The flavor of the ketchup is still on Stevie’s lip when you tug it into your mouth, tumbling him heedlessly backward onto the bed and straddling his thighs. _Again, again, again_ , the refrain repeats.

Afterward, you’re laying too close for overheated, sticky skin, but your ear is pressed against his chest when you bring up Liverpool being in the Champions League once more and his heart tattoos a wild drumbeat inside of you. Pride makes you clumsy and sentimental, enough to set your chin atop his sternum and whisper, “You go again.”

You teeter on the precipice of slumber with his arm slung securely over yours, joints and tendons lining up precisely. It’s not like being made whole again, suddenly unblemished and untarnished by the severity, the sincerity of this. You’re only left with the knowledge that loss isn’t a fatal injury and Stevie’s breath stirring the short hairs at the nape of your neck feels like skin knitting itself together again over the gaping wound. You may never feel complete, but it is a tolerable cruelty.

One lifetime may never be enough, but it’ll do.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I think I've been imaging bits and pieces of this fic since July, and it wasn't until recently that all of them seemed to settle into their slots. I don't even really know what I'm doing anymore when it comes to these two...they hurt me and I keep going back for more. i_wish_i_knew_how_to_quit_you.gif 
> 
> As always, thank you to Julia. Without you, there would be no pottery. 
> 
> (ps if you ever want to fangirl/commiserate, come find me on tumblr: ourseparatedcities.tumblr.com)


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